Last October, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon at Country Club of Jackson, rookie Cameron Champ claimed his first PGA Tour championship and a $792,000 check with a 68 in the final round of the Sanderson Farms Championship.

Three months later, on a chilly, sunny Thursday morning at University of Mississippi Medical Center, there were bigger winners as a result of that golf tournament. That’s because Sanderson Farms Championship tournament officials – along with sponsoring Century Club Charities – presented a check for $1.25 million to Friends of Children’s Hospital.

The gift is earmarked for the Campaign for Children’s of Mississippi, a philanthropic effort helping to fund construction of a seven-story pediatric tower adjacent to Batson Children’s Hospital. Ground was broken on the project in December, 2017. The tower will house 88 private neonatal intensive care units, 10 addition operating rooms, a pediatric imaging center, an outpatient clinic and a new lobby. The facility also will house the hospital’s pediatric cardiovascular program.

Joe Sanderson, CEO of Sanderson Farms, said the donation – part of the tournament’s $2.235 million donated to Mississippi charities – is the result of a year of hard work.

“We work for 12 months to get to that eight days of the Sanderson Farms Championship,” Sanderson said. “All that work is about today – and for the next 40 years. It’s about the children. It’s about this new pediatric expansion, and the physicians, nurses who will work here and the families and the children who will be cared for here.”

The $1.25 million gift was the tournament’s largest ever to the hospital, topping $1.2 million in 2017.

Batson Children’s Hospital is the state’s only hospital designed and equipped specifically for the care and treatment of sick and injured children.

Since Sanderson Farms became the title sponsor in 2013, the tournament has raised approximately $6.3 million for the children’s hospital.

Rick Cleveland, Mississippi Today’s sports columnist, was inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame in August 2017, joining many of the sports figures he has written about in 50-plus years covering Mississippi sports. He has been honored as Mississippi Sportswriter of the Year a record 11 times by the National Sports Media Foundation. Rick was executive director and historian of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and sports editor of The Clarion-Ledger before joining Mississippi Today. Reach Rick at [email protected]